Broadway Out Of the Closet

By Gerald Clarke

A musical La Cage aux Folles

Scientists can peer inside the body and brain, and measure wind speed on Mars. But the chemical reaction between performers onstage and an audience a few feet below defies explanation. If a show works, its flaws are easily forgiven and the faces out front light up with enthusiasm. If it does not, those onstage are subjected to the theatrical world's most terrifying noise: the sound of hundreds of yawns, politely stifled. So perhaps it is best not to spend too long trying to explain the attractions of the musical version of La Cage aux Folles, which opened on Broadway Sunday night. The chemistry is right, and it is hard to imagine an audience that will not leave the Palace Theater fairly glowing with delight.

The broad appeal of the show, which broke all house records during its seven-week trial run in Boston, is all the more extraordinary given its theme. Behind Jerry Herman's old-fashioned but tuneful score is a radical subject. La Cage aux Folles is a love story with a difference: it celebrates the romance of two middle-aged homosexual men, one of whom is a transvestite. Last year's Torch Song Trilogy, by Harvey Fierstein, was the first gay play to make it on Broadway, and La Cage, for which Fierstein wrote the book, seems almost certain to become the first successful gay musical. Broadway is out of the closet and has slammed the door behind it.

La Cage aux Folles (literally "Cage of Crazies"; in French slang, "Cage of Gays") is based on Jean Poiret's farce of the same title, which ran in Paris from 1973 to 1980; and it resembles the film starring Ugo Tognazzi and Michel Serrault, which became the most successful foreign-language movie ever shown in the U.S., grossing more than $40 million.

La Cage aux Folles is a Saint-Tropez drag club run by Georges. Its star performer is the incredible Zaza, who, when he takes off his dress and wig, is also Albin, Georges's lover for 20 years. Years ago, just to see what all the heterosexual fuss was about, Georges (Gene Barry) spent a few hours of passion with a showgirl. From that brief union came a son, Jean-Michel, who has lived ever since with Georges and Albin (George Hearn) in an apartment next door to La Cage.

Now, however, Jean-Michel (John Weiner) has a problem. He wants to get married, but the girl of his choice is the daughter of France's own Jerry Falwell, head of the T.F.M., the Tradition, Family and Morality party. How is poor Jean-Michel to explain his family, its tradition and its morality to that pious fanatic?

He does not plan to. When his fiancee and her parents visit, he wants to pass Georges off as a retired diplomat, bring in his real mother, whom he has not seen for 20 years, and exile Albin for the night.

Georges gives in, but Albin protests being hidden away. In one of the show's best numbers, which might well be adopted as the anthem of Gay Liberation, he sings,

I am what I am

l am my own special creation . . . It's my world

That I wanna have a little pride in My world

And it's not a place I have to hide in

Albin too eventually gives in. When Jean-Michel's mother fails to show, he puts on his dress and plays Mamma himself. Though his ruse is discovered, the show ends happily, of course, with the girl's parents in retreat, Jean-Michel accepting Georges and Albin for what they are, and the two lovers--Georges and Albin, that is--walking arm in arm offstage.

Though the musical is inferior in some ways to the movie--its plot line is less plausible, for one thing--Fierstein has improved it in other ways, making the two leads more human, more substantial and, finally, more interesting than they were in either the film or the play. "We're showing that marriage, commitment, family, don't have to belong to heterosexuals," he says. "We decided early on that our greatest enemy would be the tendency to hide, to avoid being honest. If a gay show is a hit and doesn't make a statement, what's the point?" Says Herman, who also wrote the music and lyrics for Hello, Dolly! and Mame: "Writing for Albin was no harder than writing for Dolly. We just had to be true to character."

If the parts were easy to write, they were not easy to play. Barry, 62, who had played macho characters like TV's Bat Masterson, was afraid of being too closely identified with a homosexual role. "People still call me Bat," he explains. "You really do become the part you play. In rehearsal, George and I didn't look at each other as a man or woman, but as someone we dearly loved. If I ever had a problem, I'd just think of my own wife." However he did it, Barry's portrayal of Georges is suave but concerned, exasperated but tender as well.

Hearn, 48, who has been married and divorced three times, had the same fears as Barry, but nonetheless agreed to put on full female regalia for his audition. "When George walked out, he looked like Arlene Dahl opening at the Latin Quarter," says Producer Allan Carr. "He plopped himself on top of the piano, crossed his legs and sang My Heart Belongs to Daddy. There was a kind of triumph and electricity to the way he did it. We never considered anyone else." Still, it took Hearn eight weeks to learn to sing while simultaneously putting on makeup, as he must do in his first number, and he had trouble walking down stairs like a woman. Almost as bad were the jokes he had to endure. Friends sent him lingerie ads, and Lauren Bacall told him that when he was done with La Cage, he could take over in Woman of the Year.

It was all worth it. Hearn's bravura performance is one of the marvels of recent theater seasons. An actor who has been in 115 plays but never quite achieved stardom, he has now strutted to the top. If it is exciting to see a young actor leap forward, it is even more so to see one in mid-career suddenly show the enormous range of his talents.

The chorus, known as Les Cagelles, mostly men in drag but with a few women, is something of a wonder as well. "You'll find it tough guessing our gender," they sing at the beginning, and half the fun is telling one sex from the other. David Engel, for example, was a football player in the film of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. In La Cage he is Hanna from Hamburg, a blond beauty with a taste for sadomasochism. "A stagehand in Boston saw me in my wig, leotards and whip," says Engel, "and said, 'Honey, you can whip me any time.'

'Careful!' I told him in my normal voice. His jaw dropped. He really had no idea."

Unfortunately, La Cage is not always up to the level of its best performances or its best moments. Herman's music is better-than-average Broadway fare, hummable and with a simple, insistent beat. But his lyrics are often trite and vulgar. "Look under our glitz, muscles and tits," he writes in one song. Fierstein's book is sometimes forced; the campy scenes with the black maid/butler (William Thomas Jr.) quickly become tedious, for example Arthur Laurents' direction is occasionally jarringly awry, as when he has the mother of Jean-Michel's fiancee do a degrading bump-and-grind in her underwear.

But La Cage aux Folles has found the chemical equation that makes gross faults appear small, minor virtues look large, and major achievements seem more so. Despite its gay theme, it is a sentimental show that extols the values of love, honor and fidelity to home and family; consequently, in both Boston and New York City, it seems to have drawn audiences that are largely straight. In Barry and Hearn, moreover, it boasts what may be the most romantic team of the year.

-- By Gerald Clarke

Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York

With reporting by Elaine Dutka This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.